Got Social?

Tagged: html5

SPiBot is a remote control platform with tank-like tracks. It’s a work in progress, but will be fitted with a rotatable camera, microphone, and distance sensors. It is to be controlled via the web on either a phone, tablet, or laptop.

The base for the platform is a Raspberry Pi. WiFi is used for communication. The HTML interface is served up using nginx and PHP. Motor control happens via PWM from the Pi to motor drivers. Video and pictures will be done with some combination of raspivid, vlc, ffmpeg, and raspivid.

It looks like the project is pretty far a long, but not quite finished. Hopefully the author has some pets he can terrorize when it’s finished.

Universal remote controls are a natural want. I know I hate having 100 remotes for everything remote control. So what do you do when you start getting used to using your phone as a remote (via web interfaces) ? Well start converting your other stuff to be controlled via the web too!

Dalgibbard has an entertainment center using XBMC and a Raspberry Pi. But the HDMI switcher uses an infra-red remote control. So naturally Dalgibbard hacked the switcher to be controlled by a web interface on the Raspberry Pi.

The HDMI switcher is wired up to the Raspberry Pi via a relay and a few discrete components to the GPIO pins. The pins are controlled by a python script that is executed by a web page using PHP and Apache. Simple and efficient.

DIY home automation seems to be a pretty big topic lately, I just wish they would all work together. If these guys could work with the Souliss guys that would be awesome. On to heimcontrol.js. Instead of going the app + server route, heimcontrol.js is going responsive. That’s platform agnostic html5+css3 that should look good on mobile devices, tablets and desktops.

Websockets is another technology that you don’t see widely used, but it allows your web browser to maintain a persistent connection to the server instead of polling (or even pulling data via ajax requests) so it can have super fast response times. The main server runs off of the Raspberry Pi, with communication to an Arduino. That gives you access to the gpio and peripherals the Pi has, plus all the cool things you can hack together with your Arduino.

Peeking at the code it looks like extending capabilities is pretty easy with their plug-in design. If you’ve ever done any web development you should feel pretty safe as well.

The SoundBox synth is online synth tracker you can compose in your browser. It has your usual synth components, dual oscillators, noise, envelope, LFO, etc. You can do 4 notes tracks per pattern for chords, and has a cool distortion effect.